World’s oldest war memorial may have been identified in Syria
The White Monument at Tell Banat contains the bones of what are believed to be around 30 dead soldiers, posed as if they fell in battle.
A more than 4,000-year-old artificial mound in Syria may be the world’s earliest known war memorial.
Archaeologists identified patterns in the placement of burials and other finds in the mound—known as the White Monument at Tell Banat—and concluded that the dead may have been members of an army.
The Art Newspaper
May 28, 2021
© University of Toronto
It perhaps served as a unique memorial, visible to people for kilometres around.“It was not until we recognised that there were patterns in those bone deposits that the elements fell into place. And that was pretty exciting,” says Anne Porter, assistant professor of Near Eastern archaeology at the University of Toronto, Canada, and lead author of the research paper published in the journal Antiquity.
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